For Mayor de Blasio, Police Dept. Is a Force to Be Reckoned With

Early in the evening of April 19, a few hours after a Brooklyn judge ruled that the former police officer Peter Liang’s shooting of Akai Gurley in 2014 was essentially an accident for which a prison sentence was not deemed necessary, Constance Malcolm received a call in her Bronx apartment. On the other end of the line was Valerie Bell, the mother of Sean Bell, who was killed by the police a decade ago outside a Queens nightclub, where he had been celebrating at his bachelor party. Four years ago, Ms. Malcolm’s son Ramarley Graham was shot and killed by a police officer, Richard Haste, in the company of several others, a few feet from where she was now standing. Her mother and her younger son, Chinnor Campbell, then 6, were at home when it happened.

Tragedy has a habit of compelling its survivors toward a kind of obliterating inertia or relentless activism. Mr. Graham’s mother, Mr. Bell’s mother, Eric Garner’s mother and others who have lost children to the violence born of police prejudice or misjudgment have devoted themselves to calling for accountability and justice. Ms. Malcolm would say her own efforts had been largely fruitless. Despite the rallies, news conferences and petitions — Ms. Malcolm has appeared in front of City Hall three times in the past two months — Officer Haste remains on the force, on modified duty. He, another officer and a sergeant face internal disciplinary charges pending an investigation, but Ms. Malcolm has not been able to find out what the charges against Officer Haste’s colleagues are, nor what will become of other officers who were on hand at the time of her son’s death, some of whom have not been publicly identified.

When I posed these questions to the New York Police Department, a spokesman, Lt. John Grimpel, responded in an irritated tone that he didn’t have to tell me.

In terms of transparency and accountability, the administration of Mayor Bill de Blasio, Ms. Malcolm remarked to me, “is just as bad as Giuliani’s and Bloomberg’s.” The requests she has made to meet with Mr. de Blasio since he took office have been denied. The mayor did, however, meet with the retired tennis star James Blake only days after Mr. Blake was thrown to the ground by a plainclothes officer who had mistaken him for someone else.

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Chinnor Campbell, 10, the brother of Ramarley Graham, who was killed by an officer in 2012.CreditElias Jerel Williams for The New York Times

After her son was killed, Ms. Malcolm, who works in a nursing home in Westchester, remained largely out of commission for a year. “I couldn’t function,” she said. In the aftermath of the shooting, her son Chinnor, who was seated next to her when I visited, had difficulty sleeping and trouble in school. “The teacher was calling all the time,” Ms. Malcolm said. Chinnor kept running out of the classroom; eventually he transferred to a new school. For two years she wouldn’t let him play outside; the prospect worried her too much. “I tried to watch TV and get out of my mind,” Chinnor told me. After a while, Ms. Malcolm got him a dog. Her daughter, who had originally planned to go the Police Academy, decided against it. Instead, she started making caps with the image of two hands up that read, “Don’t Shoot.”

As Mr. de Blasio, a Democrat, begins his bid for re-election next year, he will almost certainly be challenged on his record of police reform. As long as a culture in which obfuscation is regarded as an entitlement continues to dominate the department, he is vulnerable to the accusation that little has changed. When the Legal Aid Society sued New York City for access to records pertaining to Officer Daniel Pantaleo, who put Eric Garner in the illegal chokehold that killed him, and a judge ruled in the organization’s favor, the city did not graciously turn over the keys to the file cabinet but instead appealed.

What effect will all of this have on the mayor’s base of support? Last year, Councilman Andy King, a Bronx Democrat who represents the district where Mr. Graham was killed, spoke favorably of the mayor in an interview with The New York Observer. In February, at a rally outside City Hall at which Ms. Malcolm urged the mayor to have Officer Haste fired, Mr. King led a chant of “No hope, No vote,” implying that the electorate should cast its votes elsewhere if Mr. de Blasio failed to act.

At the same time, activists, particularly those who are part of the Police Reform Organizing Project, hold regular rallies in protest of what they view as the status quo problems of broken-windows policing. Despite the drastic declines in the use of stop-and-frisk tactics under the de Blasio administration, the group argues that bias reigns. A report that the group released in March said that in 1,880 cases recorded in criminal courts in Manhattan, the Bronx, Brooklyn and Queens, from June 3, 2014, to March 18, 2016, 91 percent of the defendants were minorities.

Add to this the widely circulated video of a black postal worker, Glen Grays, handcuffed and carted away while he was working in Brooklyn, for no apparent reason, and the marketing of successful police reform becomes an even greater political challenge. (Within a month after the Grays episode, the Queens district attorney’s office announced it was indicting two detectives accused of assaulting another uniformed Postal Service employee.) Many voters are unlikely to pay much attention to the complicated, and arguably politically motivated, fund-raising scandals currently plaguing City Hall. But images of abuse and rank unfairness they get.

Email: bigcity@nytimes.com

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page MB1 of the New York edition with the headline: For de Blasio, a Force to Be Reckoned With. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe